Courtesy of MUBI.

I’m not going to pretend that this festival dispatch isn’t overdue by close to half a year. Due to various other work and writing obligations that got in the way, I haven’t had the chance to sit down and write down any thoughts about the second year of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies. Indeed, I’ve tarried so long that I’m writing these words on the plane to the New York Film Festival, as good a marker as any that it’s time to jot down some thoughts before some of these films totally disappear from my memory. My LAFM was considerably expanded from last year—encompassing every feature film save the comedy-horror film Dead Lover, the Tim Robinson vehicle Friendship (which happened to screen at the same time as the festival’s sole world premiere), and the restoration title Will—which was largely a result of what seemed to me to be a generally more eclectic approach to programming than the festival’s first year. Whether this was the result of the festival finding its footing or an unusually strong offering of cinema on the margins remains to be seen, but it is a welcome development in either event. As you might expect, my thoughts on each of these films will be shorter than both what I had previously envisioned for this dispatch and last year’s three-film entry, but the slate was consistently intriguing enough to prompt even these few words. (Further disclaimer: since I don’t have access to wi-fi at the moment, more serious than usual factual errors/omissions may occur.)

The festival’s opening night film came from what might be, based on its director’s debut, an unexpected source. Amalia Ulman’s first feature El Planeta (2019) was one of the more delightful breakthroughs in recent memory, an overtly Hongian black-and-white comedy starring Ulman and her mother. Magic Farm, which premiered at Sundance, does in fact make sense as a gala selection, featuring Chloë Sevigny and Simon Rex in key supporting roles and a much more distinctly poppy, brightly-colored aesthetic. The basis of these choices comes from the ostensible premise, a VICE-style online show whose crew travels to an Argentinian village in search of a sensational story. When the production grinds to a halt, its members and the tentative relationships (platonic and romantic) they form take center stage, particularly the production assistants, including Alex Wolff and Ulman herself once more. Frequently incorporating iPhone footage and a few shots of distorted GoPro footage that bear a startling resemblance to last year’s LAFM highlight The Human Surge 3, the film is an admirable attempt by Ulman to engage in a completely different style, and there are some lovely moments of cross-cultural connection directly facilitated by its modern, online means of communication. But though Magic Farm gets a decent amount of mileage from the pathetic or merely lost outsiders, there is a familiarity to its satire that detracts from its more intriguing elements.

An altogether more successful instance of self-reinvention could be found in Invention, directed by Courtney Stephens and with an additional “a film by” credit given to star and co-writer Callie Hernandez. (Disclaimer: Stephens is a friend; I’ve also had the benefit of watching this film twice.) The latter plays Cassie Fernandez, who, just like her near-namesake, has recently suffered the unexpected death of her father, a self-styled health guru and daytime-TV mainstay. After learning that her father had massive debts but bequeathed to her a patent for a mysterious device, she seeks to learn more about its provenance, visiting with her father’s past clients, manufacturers, and friends while residing in his beautiful home in the woods. Stephens was previously best known for her documentaries, including The American Sector (2020, co-directed with Pacho Velez) and the live performance Terra Femme (2021). Accordingly, the film assumes a hybrid form, signaled by Hernandez’s presence and the inclusion of archival PSA and television footage of the father peddling his products and ideas; there are even a few interludes that overlay production chatter onto a shot of a flickering candle. But all of these would not function if Stephens and Hernandez were not so careful in their sketching of a coherent character arc where—in a manner not so dissimilar from David Cronenberg’s extraordinary The Shrouds from the same year—the destabilizing state of grief leads one down conspiratorial pathways as a means of reckoning with loss. The encounters along the way—including with people ably played by independent directors Joe Swanberg, Caveh Zahedi, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins as the attorny and executor—eventually culminate in a truly moving display of catharsis for Hernandez/Fernandez.

Another 16mm reverie came courtesy of French director Virgil Vernier’s Cent mille milliards (which translates to “one hundred thousand billion”), whose previous film Sophia Antipolis was a highlight of the 2019 edition of Locarno in Los Angeles. Here, he decamps to Monaco, largely following the slowly-forming bond between a male sex worker, a Russian dancer, and a Chinese daughter temporarily visiting the affluent town. From what little I remember of both films, this present work is somewhat looser and overtly sympathetic to the outsiders at its center. Vernier’s gift for capturing the sickly allure of his surroundings is on full display here, especially as the holiday season develops, and such images of his characters traversing these near-liminal spaces make up for a lot of the more unproductively hazy relationship developments.

It can sometimes be fraught to describe any particular restoration as a breakout—what might be a revelation to one person might be old hat to someone else—but with that caveat it’s fair to say that British filmmaker Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981) is one of the most significant restorations of the last few years. Unfurling over the course of a single night at a hotel, almost completely from the perspective of the female concierge, the film has drawn deserved comparisons to Chantal Akerman among others, but there’s an oneiric pull that’s accentuated by the strikingly angular features of its main actor, the frequent use of point-of-view shots, and an unpredictable rhythm to the perambulations of the hotel’s occupants, both permanent and transient. Shot by legendary American iconoclast Jon Jost in sumptuous shadowy graininess, the barely-over-an-hour film feels much longer than that, for the better, and its textures and portent are extremely difficult to shake.

From what I experienced on the ground, there was no film more widely divisive than Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, Julian Castronovo’s own first directorial feature; for my money, it was the best film in the festival. Unspooling as an investigation of Castronovo’s disappearance that was spurred by his own quest to discover the meaning of a mysterious notebook that he found in the wall of his compartment, the film incorporates a neutral voiceover by an unidentified female collator, many scans or images of relevant and irrelevant items, and webcam footage of Castronovo as he narrates his own findings. The result is something that feels in the neighborhood of James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Ricky D’Ambrose while possessed with a gift for mordant humor that feels like all its own, a continually disarming work that eventually incorporates performance art, a cutting depiction of modern cinephile culture—a gag involving boutique distributors is especially inspired—and no-budget filmmaking far more technically sophisticated than might be expected from someone of Castronovo’s tender age.

LAFM’s sole world premiere was a surprisingly high-profile (in at least one sense of the term) get: Room Temperature, the second directorial collaboration between legendary gay novelist Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley. I must confess an unfortunate unfamiliarity with the former’s prose work, though I was able to catch up with their previous film Permanent Green Light (2018), a French film concerned with the death drive of suburban teenagers. This film’s is much closer to home, taking place in a community in the American Southwest, surrounding a single family determined to continue its tradition of crafting a haunted house in the face of growing dissatisfaction, if not outright hostility from both without and within. Though the general style is often impressive, utilizing long shots and chiaroscuro in ways that emphasize the isolation of its setting and family members. In the end, though, the final act’s turn towards psychosis is a little unsatisfying and preordained.

Zodiac Killer Project, by British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton, was one of the three most lauded documentaries at Sundance this year, understandably: after his proposed true-crime documentary about a specific theory concerning the identity of the Zodiac Killer had its funding fall through at the last minute, Shackleton decided to make a different version on his own terms. The result is oddly not so dissimilar from Debut: the bulk of the film is shots of the locations where the events took place and/or where Shackleton would have filmed his reenactments, while his voiceover weaves between straight recounting and musings about both his ultimately failed production and larger ideas about the often debased nature of true crime and documentary filmmaking at large. These latter sections, which include biting examples of the homogenized house styles, are the film’s most pleasurable, and it becomes increasingly clear that, despite some of Shackleton’s bemused protestations to the contrary, this version is almost certainly more compelling than any conventional form he could have made. However, the film is unfortunately something less than the sum of its parts, particularly in the decision to include copious use of (possibly public domain) footage, accompanied invariably by a woodblock hit, that more overtly illustrates the conventional true crime elements in a way that feels at odds with the Landscape Suicide-inspired suggestiveness of the shots that surround it.

It was perhaps only a matter of time before the redoubtable Omnes Films, perhaps current American independent cinema’s most promising collective, showed up in LAFM, represented here by French filmmaker Alexandra Simpson’s directorial debut No Sleep Till. (Disclaimer: I am good friends with the entire collective, including Simpson and producer Tyler Taormina). Though it represents something of an expansion in Omnes’s scope, as the first film by a non-founding member and to take place outside of the American Northeast or Los Angeles, it is a welcome, distinctive addition to the collective’s growing treasure trove of intimate portraits of a quietly free-floating time and place. In this instance, it’s a Florida town bracing for a hurricane of unprecedented magnitude; while some hole up, others go out and party, and one duo of friends resolves to leave their jobs and drive north in search of shelter. This last section, talky and frank about their intertwining quotidian and extreme anxieties, exists in deliberate counterpoint to the minimal dialogue of many other strands, including a stormchaser, whose videos of past storms are incorporated into the kaleidoscope of dreamy nighttime tableaus. The sanguine sensibility in the face of natural disaster conjures a potent yet fittingly lowkey mood.

The closing night film was Happyend, the fiction feature debut of Japanese-American filmmaker Sora Neo, whose Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus was one of the great music films of recent years. That sense for rhythm and tone is folded into a considerably grander canvas: in a near-future Tokyo, following a prank on the school principal by the members of the electronic music club, a surveillance system that automatically cites pupils for any perceived misbehaviors, no matter how benign. In the face of this, two of the club members operate on increasingly divergent paths, with one wanting to maintain his carefree ways and the other getting involved in radical activities resisting an increasingly draconian government. Considering all of this freighted text, it’s thus something of a miracle that Happyend‘s title is by no means willfully ironic; it is instead one that belongs to a film of a profound, genuinely optimism in the power of the youth to make a difference in the world. Through the detail of its characters’ hangouts and struggles, their hopes and moments of play, Sora fashions a world of possibility entirely in keeping with the multitude of promising voices offered at this year’s festival.